I agree with Steve's reasoning on the wildcards. I typically do have a
pretty wide filter set so I would choose not to iGate with a wildcard
anyway. But if the capability is there, it will get used (and abused) by
some. I have no problem with specifying each object I wish to gate.
73.....Ron.....AC7TK.....(-9 when mobile)
UI-View32 iGate in Eugene, OR
-----Original Message-----
From: aprssig-bounces at lists.tapr.org
[mailto:aprssig-bounces at lists.tapr.org]On Behalf Of Steve Dimse
Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 5:38 AM
To: TAPR APRS Mailing List
Subject: [aprssig] IGate wildcards/Telpac data
First, I have an embryonic Telpac page set up:
http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/telpac.cgi
An issue has come up in discussion of the subject of the Telpac objects, I
think
the general APRS community should discuss this. First a little background...
Initially I was very much opposed to the use of wildcards in IGate blessed
callsign lists. I felt that the danger of someone entering a bad wildcard
call
and flooding the local network outweighed any benefit. However, when Dale
started sending the weather warnings, that changed, the ability to gate
wildcards was needed to take advantage of this cool feature.
The situation with telpac nodes is different. Currently, they are being sent
as
objects with the callsign and object names the same. The proposal is to
change
this to sending with a prefix of WL-...so for example, if I had a node the
packet might look like:
WL-K4HG>APWL2K:;K4HG-11:.......
The idea here is to use a wildcard in the IGate to send out all telpac
nodes. In
order to avoid flooding the local area with these packets, the IGate would
need
to use a filtered port set to an appropriate radius to be sure that only
local
nodes were sent to RF.
In theory, this will work fine. In practice, it is virtually certain that
some
IGates will run WL-* in the IGate list, and end up on an unfiltered port,
flooding the IGates.
I am very much opposed to this because while I think the telpac node
information
on RF is a very good thing, any excessive gating to RF is guaranteed to
create
controversy, and in the end will harm efforts to get Telpac, Echolink, and
other
ham system objects integrated with APRS.
My feeling is the real callsigns should be used for these objects, and an
IGate
operator should need to enter each one manually into his code. There is
always
the option for IGate programmers to add the ability to detect these packets
themselves, and send out ones within a set radius. I just think the wildcard
is
too dangerous to accept. Another problem is this would prevent the
deployment of
any KISS IGates in the future. These would have the effect of shortening the
IGated packets, and even though no IGate currently uses this, I think it is
foolish to throw this possibility away.
Currently, findU is blocking this plan because of a long-standing (meaning I
didn't add this to block the plan, it was added years ago to prevent
the -NET,
-HOME, -IP SSIDs that were becoming problematic) requirement that callsigns
be
AX-25 compliant. If the community does not object to the WL- plan, I can and
will remove the restriction.
What do you think?
Steve K4HG
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